COMMUNITIES & SOCIAL MEDIA: The topic of my dissertation

My idea is to reach about how social media tools impact on communities around a product, service, organization or company.

Can these tools make the communities to be created, grow, improve or be affected in some way?

How the is the structure/culture of the company being impacted?

I want to research about how existing “real” communities get impacted with all these new online tools and how companies can reach their objectives within the communities using these tools.

I will exclude the communities around concepts, religion neither political thought. I will start my research clarifying exactly what type of communities I will research about.

Motivation

Harvard Business Review Analytic Services (2010) published an analysis on the use of social by 2100 companies.

They found that:

• Three-quarters (75%) of the companies in the survey said they did not know where their most valuable customers were talking about them.
• Nearly one-third (31%) do not measure effectiveness of social media.
• Less than one-quarter (23%) are using social media analytic tools.
• A fraction (7%) of participating companies is able to integrate social media into their marketing activities.

In their conclusion, they explained that “Two-thirds of the companies in the survey predicted their use of social media would grow significantly over the next few years, as the awareness of the power of social media has grown in their companies”

The company I work for in Uruguay has a community around the main product that started in 1991. We started to use social media tools some years ago but without a deep knowledge of how these tools can contribute to the community.

I have been in contact with some companies that have communities and use social media and social networking to maintain the community alive and they showed open to share information with me for my dissertation.

There are also many tools to measure the impact of the tools on the communities.

I would like my research could help other companies be aware of how powerful could be the use of these tools in their communities for specific objectives.

Therefore, my plan is to do a research and analyse different companies to find answers to that:

1. Type of communities around a company/product/service they have
2. What are the objectives that these companies have upon their community?
3. How was the community before they started using social media & social networking tools? Size, activities, objectives, etc.
4. What is the objective of the use of a specific tool?
5. What tools are they using?
6. How the use of these tools impact on those communities?
7. How fast can communities grow?
8. Are these tools helping to reach the corporate objectives?
9. Can the use of the tools be generalized to similar communities with similar objectives?
10. Is the culture of the company impacted since they started using these tools?

Source of Information

Literature review will be the first source of information in order to have material to compare with the companies, find insight and to know what exactly to look for.

Later on, it is needed to collect data from interviews, company statistics and online public metrics as well as compare the literary findings with the company examples.